By Corrie Miller
In our last blog post we talked about why your presentation might fail to meet its objective (connect with your audience, convert the sale). One of the biggies: Bad slidedecks. If your visuals don’t add anything to your talk, you’re wasting your time and your audience is tuning out. Let’s address this and show you some examples of what works.
According to the Media Education Centre, research at 3M Corporation has shown that:
The brain processes images a whopping 60,000 times faster than words.
It’s called the Image Superiority Effect.
Furthermore, in the same article it is said that Psychologist Albert Mehrabian demonstrated that:
93% of communication is nonverbal.
Yes body language, eye contact and the like are crucial, but a big part of that non-verbal communication is what visuals you choose to compliment what you say.
Incorporating images into your presentations:
a) Gets your audience’s attention
b) Can contradict a point to be provocative, or for humour’s sake and
c) Reinforces a point to make it resonate with the audience. It makes it “sticky”.
Key messages strategically placed alongside your use of images can go a long way to aiding the retention of your subject matter in the classroom, in a sales pitch, or at that keynote address.
Ultimately if your audience remembers what you spoke about they remember you.
In my previous post I gave this example of what not to do:
Who hasn’t at some point been in a lecture hall where the speaker/teacher droned on and on (and.on.) while you frantically took notes, all the while not hearing one iota of what was being said? Yep, me too.
So what does work?
Here are some examples of Calculated Presentations’ slides using images to aid in the audience’s retention of information. These were used in a recent presentation given on the topic of presenting. Notes were available afterward.
If you have a very information-heavy presentation, speak to that fact but use fewer slides and hand out the notes afterward. Letting your audience know that you will have information for them after the talk let’s the audience relax and enjoy your presentation without having to worry about scribbling their way through it.
Always remember when putting together your next presentation that:
Images evoke emotion and emotion is what makes people remember. It’s what makes people BUY: Your product and your idea.
Many companies still require their employees to present with very text-heavy branded slidedecks. If that is what you are up against, we would challenge you to insert just one or two slides where images serve as the backdrop to your information into your next presentation. Change can be made but sometimes it just takes some time to change conventional thought. When your presentations are getting that sale or influencing your audience and the competition isn’t, conventional wisdom will change.
To Your Voice